Daily Archives: September 30, 2013

Jimmy Graham #80 celebrates with Drew Brees #9 of the New Orleans Saints after scoring a touchdown against the Miami Dolphins at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome on September 30, 2013 in New Orleans, Louisiana.Photo: Chris Graythen/Getty Images

NEW ORLEANS — Drew Brees made his latest claim to the moniker of Mr. Monday Night.

He also gave the Miami Dolphins another reason to regret not making a harder push to sign him when they had the chance seven years ago.

Brees passed for 413 yards and four touchdowns, and the New Orleans Saints turned a clash of unbeaten teams into a lopsided affair, beating Miami 38-17 on Monday night.

“I felt like we found our rhythm,” Brees said. “Every time we touched the ball it felt like we were going to go down and score points.”

Two of Brees’ touchdowns went to Jimmy Graham for 27 and 43 yards as the tight end had at least 100 yards receiving for the third straight game.

Brees’ other scoring strikes went to Benjamin Watson and Darren Sproles, who also rushed for a touchdown.

“This team is so dynamic, we have so many weapons and Drew knows exactly where to go with the ball,” Graham said.

Sproles’ 5-yard scoring run on the game’s opening series gave the Saints a lead they would not relinquish en route to their first 4-0 start since their Super Bowl championship season of 2009. The Saints started last season with four losses.

“We like this a lot better,” Brees said of the 4-0 start. “Everything that could have gone wrong for us went wrong. Fortunately we’re having the ball bounce our way this year. We’re playing good football.”

Ryan Tannehill passed for 249 yards and a touchdown to Charles Clay, but his four turnovers on a fumble and three interceptions hurt Miami (3-1).

“They were huge,” Miami coach Joe Philbin said of the turnovers. “We were down 14-10 late in the first half and in possession of the ball, and while we hadn’t played great in the game, we were right in there and hanging around. Those were big giveaways.”

The Saints have won their last nine Monday night games, all with Brees at quarterback and often putting on some of his most memorable performances.

There was his 307-yard, four-TD performance against Atlanta late in the 2011 season, the same game in which he broke Dan Marino’s 27-year-old record for yards passing in a season.

Earlier that same season, Brees threw for 363 yards and four scores in a 49-24 Monday night win over the New York Giants.

The Saints’ Super Bowl campaign was highlighted by Brees’ 371 yards and five touchdowns in New Orleans’ stunning 38-17 rout of Tom Brady and the New England Patriots.

Now his 10th 400-yard outing since he joined the Saints in 2006 delivered a sobering blow to a Miami team that came in riding a surprising start.

“We’ll find out a lot about the team we have by the way we come back tomorrow,” Philbin said.

When Brees was a free agent after the 2005 season, he drew the most interest from New Orleans and Miami, but the Dolphins, fearful of the effects of reconstructive surgery on Brees throwing shoulder, did not pursue the quarterback as enthusiastically as then-Saints rookie coach Sean Payton. Since then, Brees has become one of the most prolific quarterbacks in NFL history.

During New Orleans’ opening drive, Brees became only the seventh quarterback to pass for more than 47,000 yards. He ended the drive with 47,030, surpassing Fran Tarkenton’s 47,003 for sixth most yards passing all-time.

Later, Brees’ eighth completion gave him 4,124 in his career, one more than John Elway for fourth all-time in that category.

Brees was 30 of 39 against Miami without an interception. Sproles caught seven passes for 114 yards. Marques Colston had seven catches for 96 yards.

Miami’s Lamar Miller had 62 yards rushing on 11 carries, including a 5-yard scoring run late in the second quarter that made it 14-10, but the Saints began to run away with the game after that, and as they did, they turned up their pass rush. Tannehill was sacked four times in the second half, once each by Junior Galette, Martez Wilson, Cameron Jordan and Tyrunn Walker.

Miami was driving for a potential go-ahead score in the second quarter when Tannehill tried to scramble up the middle and was stripped by linebacker Curtis Lofton. Safety Rafael Bush recovered on the New Orleans 38. That set up a drive that ended with Graham’s leaping, juggling catch as three defenders converged on him.

Later in the half, Jabari Greer intercepted a pass intended for Brian Hartline, and returned it 22 yards to the Miami 23. Several plays later, Sproles made a catch along the left sideline, spun away from a converging defender and scored his second touchdown with 55 seconds left in the half to make it 21-10.

Dwane Casey, head coach of the Toronto Raptors, said that the team will rely more on their three-point shot, specifically the corner areas, and cut back on their non-paint two’s.

According to NBA analytics, the best way to improve a team’s offense is to cut back on shots from the less rewarding areas (i.e. mid-range), attempt more threes and more shots directly at the rim. It opens up offensive rebounding opportunities and free-throw trips.

“Corner threes, paint, get to the rim, get to the free throw line, and subsequently shooting percentage is going to go up,” Casey said.

The Denver Nuggets, Masai Ujiri‘s old team, used this strategy extensively and had the fifth best offensive rating last season. They took the most shots at the rim, ranked seventh in corner-three attempts and were fifth in the free throw rate category. The Houston Rockets also employed this strategy and had the sixth best offensive rating.

To help reshape the offense, Ujiri brought in Tyler Hansbrough, Steve Novak, D.J. Augustine and Austin Daye. While neither of the four players are going to be difference makers on their own, they can all help improve a bench that was 22nd in offensive rating last season.

Hansbrough, although not known for his scoring abilities, is one of the best at getting to the line and grabbing offensive rebounds, two key areas in Dean Oliver’s Four Factor theory.

This is where the Novak addition might help in a big way since he is such an accurate shooter. When he was on the floor last season, the New York Knicks shot 16 percentage points better than when he was on the bench.

After the Rudy Gay trade, their starters were strong defensively (ninth in defensive rating), yet struggled scoring the ball (20th in offensive rating). Their bench struggled on both ends of the floor — 24th in offensive rating and 25th in defensive rating.

Overall, the Raptors were 21st in offensive rating and 18th in defensive rating in the Gay era. Prior to the trade, they were 11th in offensive rating (and 26th in defensive rating) with Jose Calderon running the team.

Raptor’s shot chart during the Rudy Gay era.

Why the huge drop off?

Well, two things stand out. First, the Raptors attempted less three-pointers and hit them at a lower rate. Two, they turned the ball over a significant amount. They also shared the ball more, but that is the Calderon factor. They still attempted the same number of mid-range shots prior to the trade.

Since the Raptors were so dependant on Gay and DeRozan, their mid-range shots had to fall for them to win games, which is obviously not the most effective strategy. So it is a good idea that they are thinking about shifting away from their mid-range oriented offense.

However, just attempting more threes won’t just solve their scoring issues. There is also the issue of turnovers.

Before the trade, they were third in turnover ratio with Calderon at point. After the trade, they were 24th while their starters were fifth worst in the league. This is a significant since the Raptor starters were also 21st in opponents points off turnovers.

The worst offenders on team were Kyle Lowry and Jonas Valanciunas.

Lowry, a careless ball-handler and an average play-maker, has always had issues with turnovers throughout his entire career. Casey preferred the pass-first Calderon’s style of play because he was able to get the team running very efficiently. The team wanted Lowry to play more like the Spaniard, and for good reason too. They performed better when Lowry played that style.

Lowry’s numbers during their wins — the assist percentage, turnover ratio, assist ratio, usage rate, etc — were eerily similar to Calderon’s overall numbers. Lowry did do a good job of running the team in the month of April, but the sample size is too small (only 9 games), and it is unclear whether he can play like that this season.

As for Valanciunas, he has a bit of a turnover issue in the post despite his scoring efficiency. He clearly has a lot of work to do inside as he is prone to getting stripped and committing offensive fouls. The team needs to continue being patient with him this coming season since he needs to go through growing pains sooner rather than later.

Overall, don’t expect them to completely turn it around offensively and become a top ten team in that category. They should see some improvement from last season if they strategically take better shots and cut down on their turnovers.

“Nothing is ever settled in this town,” George Shultz, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state and a veteran of the political wars, once advised. In Washington, defeat is always temporary. You lose a vote, you win the next. Win a vote, and your opponents will that day be plotting its repeal. For the next election is never more than two years away, and before that are the primaries, and …

Americans like to keep their representatives on a short leash. Not only are election campaigns perennially in season, but as often as not the result is to divide control of the government between the two parties. People who are inclined to see the present era of confrontation as a strange new development, or a wholly Republican phenomenon, forget their history.

From 1980 to 1992, a period in which the Republicans were in control of the White House but the Democrats controlled one or both houses of Congress, the government of the United States ran out of money no fewer than nine times. To be sure, most of these “appropriations funding gaps” — between the passage of a new resolution extending the government’s spending authority and the expiry of the last — were over in a couple of days. Much worse was the record under Jimmy Carter, when the Democrats controlled all three: presidency, Senate and House. In just those four years, the government shut down six times, for a total of 66 days of government. In just those four years, the government shut down six times, for a total of 66 days.

But of course the shutdown most people remember was the last, in 1996, when the Republicans, in control of the House for the first time since 1952, overplayed their hand and revived Bill Clinton’s fading presidency. It is entirely possible today’s Republicans may be about to do the same for Barack Obama.

But the situations are very different. Then, it was their leaders who were responsible. Today’s crisis is driven not by the leadership or even the majority of the party, but by an intense and disciplined minority, itself a product of the changes that have overtaken the country in recent years.

Scarred by the financial crisis and badly frightened by the massive expansion of government that followed, the Republican base is in no mood to compromise. But then, neither are the Democrats. Though the country is more or less evenly divided, Democratic and Republican districts are increasingly homogeneous, a product both of gerrymandering and of “self-sorting,” or voter migration. Congressmen are less and less concerned with winning and keeping the approval of the electorate at large, and more and more so that of their own grassroots. Back down in a fight like this, and face a primary challenge at the next election.

Add to this the cockamamie rules of U.S. budgeting, notably the requirement for Congress to vote twice, once on the budget itself, a second time on the debt ceiling — the second to decide whether to fund the deficit the first had approved — and some such showdown was more or less inevitable.

Indeed, it is now almost routine. Critics despair that America has become ungovernable, immobilized for long stretches (see “gridlock”) broken by short periods of hair-raising brinksmanship: over the debt ceiling in 2011, the fiscal cliff in 2012, and now over the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. ObamaCare. Even shutting down the government no longer produces quite the frisson it used to. It is now necessary to threaten to repudiate the government’s debt: a very real possibility, if the current conflict is not resolved by mid-month, when the government reaches the limits of its borrowing authority.

And yet, as messy as it looks, as undignified as it seems, it is also … working. The 2011 conflict produced the Budget Control Act, which cut $900 billion from spending over 10 years. Widely judged a capitulation by Obama, it nevertheless led to a decline in Republican support: when it came time to negotiate last year’s “fiscal cliff” agreement, a re-elected Obama was able to demand, and win, $600 billion in tax increases. The result of all this haggling, taken together, has been just the sort of balanced approach, mixing spending cuts and tax increases, that most experts advise, but that neither side was likely to produce on its own — and a sharp decline in budget deficits: from 10% of GDP in fiscal 2009, to a projected 2.1% of GDP in fiscal 2015.

For all the Republican determination to repeal ObamaCare, moreover, it remains the case that the “gridlocked” American system in recent years has succeeded in passing, not only major health-care reform, but an $800-billion bailout of the banking system in the bargain. What similarly bold measures has Canada, with its more “efficient” parliamentary system, enacted in the same period?

Don’t get me wrong. I still prefer the parliamentary system. But Canadians should not look upon the shenanigans south of the border and conclude that, because we are not in a similarly chaotic state, all is well. Neither system is operating as it should; partisanship has degraded both into parodies of themselves. But between a system that forces the parties to negotiate, and one that allows one side to simply roll over the other, it’s far from clear ours is superior.

America is a sharply divided society at present, confronted with great challenges and with no consensus on how to address them. There is no advantage in a system that suppresses these divisions, or a politics that pretends they don’t exist.

Stanley Cup-winning coaches extol virtues of team toughness

After last year's sprint to the Cup, full season will be truer test

By the second week of the pre-season, Carlyle was tired of talking about Game 7.In chiding reporters for asking about the Toronto Maple Leafs' stunning collapse in the first round against the Boston Bruins last season, the coach joked that he "forgot about it already."Photo: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette

TORONTO — Randy Carlyle and Mike Babcock, head coaches of the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Detroit Red Wings respectively, were invited to be guest speakers at the same coaching clinic at the Air Canada Centre on Saturday.

In terms of same-page cohesion, this was like having Felix and Oscar from The Odd Couple host a seminar on home decorating.

Carlyle and Babcock are opposites. Carlyle likes big teams. Babcock likes small teams. Carlyle prefers fourth-line players who can fight. Babcock prefers players who can make you pay if you take penalties. Or so the thinking goes.

In reality, Carlyle does not see much difference between the Maple Leafs and the Red Wings or how he and Babcock coach. Carlyle would take Pavel Datsyuk ahead of Colton Orr any day of the week, just as Babcock would gladly find a spot for David Clarkson among his roster of Europeans.

“I laugh at it at times,” Carlyle said. “There’s a perception that (the Leafs) only play the one way. But in reality, we have a lot of skilled players in our lineup. People look at us and say, ‘We led the league in hits and we led the league in blocked shots and we led the league in fights.’ Well, that was a byproduct of what we are.”

What the Leafs finally are is Randy Carlyle’s team. That became apparent by the decisions that were made this summer. Carlyle did not work the phones and acquire David Bolland in a trade from the Chicago Blackhawks or personally sign Clarkson to a seven-year contract worth US$36.75-million. But his fingerprints were on the moves.

The two players are Carlyle-type players. They are skilled, but they also come with intangibles like on-ice toughness and character. Bolland, who has won two Stanley Cups in the last four years, is affectionately known as a rat; Clarkson led the New Jersey Devils in both goals (15) and penalty minutes (78) last season.

On a team that ended a seven-year playoff drought by playing a style seemingly predicated on fighting and intimidation, the thinking is that both players should make Toronto even tougher to play against this year.

But how much is too much? As evidenced by the pre-season game against the Buffalo Sabres, in which Clarkson hopped over the boards to help Phil Kessel from being hurt in a fight, you can sometimes hurt your team more than your opponent by constantly dropping the gloves.

The 10-game suspension that Clarkson received for leaving the bench illustrated that Carlyle-type hockey has its risks. Namely, players who are in the penalty box more than on the ice are wasting roster spots. But Carlyle is OK with this as long as the bottom-six grinders are protecting the top-six stars, so that at the end of the day Kessel and Nazem Kadri will feel safe and can perform at a higher level.

“It’s just a support system,” Kadri said. “(The fighters are) the safety valves and they understand what their jobs are. It is comforting to know that they’ve got my back. I’ve got their backs too.”

In Detroit, there are no enforcers. The only people who have Datsyuk’s back are the referees, something that will not change with the team’s move to the Atlantic Division this year.

“Would I like to have a big, tough guy in the middle of the lineup? Yeah,” Red Wings GM Ken Holland told Yahoo! Sports’ Nick Cotsoniko. “But I haven’t really bought into having fourth-line guys that don’t have much skill and are one-dimensional players. I guess I put more of a premium on goals.”

Toronto also puts a premium on goals. But whereas other teams might spread out their scoring, the onus is on the top three lines to provide the offence. That formula worked last season. It did not matter that Orr, who averaged less than seven minutes and was second in the league with 13 fights, had one goal or that Frazer McLaren, who averaged five minutes and had 12 fights, had three goals.

The Leafs still ranked sixth in scoring (3.02 goals per game) while the Red Wings were 20th (2.54). At the same time, Toronto led the league in hits (1,626), blocked shots (826) and fights (44). Detroit was in the bottom three in all categories.

“I think it’s misrepresented when you say, ‘It’s Randy Carlyle’s style of hockey,'” the Leafs coach said. “There isn’t a coach in the league that doesn’t want their players to compete hard, to take a check to make a play, to stand up for one another’s well-being or if someone is being taking advantage of.

“I’m sure Mike Babcock wants his team to play aggressively or hard. No one would say Pavel Datsyuk or Henrik Zetterberg don’t play hard. They’re skilled players but they also play hard. That’s their model.”

The model that Carlyle is using today is the same one that he used to win a Stanley Cup in Anaheim and has since influenced teams like Boston, Los Angeles and St. Louis. Even Montreal has a pair of former Anaheim enforcers (George Parros and Travis Moen) on a fourth line with Brandon Prust.

“It’s absolutely a winning formula,” said retired forward Brad May, who was a part of that championship Ducks team in 2006-07. “There’s no question that the top players have to score, but it’s also about getting them into a situation where they can score by protecting them and having that comfort level.”

Again, how much is too much? Is Toronto really a better team with two fourth-line players who can fight rather than score? Is skill and speed not scarier than size?

“I don’t think a goon team works in this league,” said one Western Conference GM. “There’s very few teams where you go in there and think you’re going to run a team out of the building and it’s going to be like the ’60s or ’70s and you can intimidate a team.”

Maybe not, but Toronto looks like it is going to try. Or, at the very least, go down punching.

The Chicago Blackhawks will not go unbeaten for the first half of the season this time, no matter how good they are. The Boston Bruins will try to climb all the way back to that distant place where hearts get broken for the last time (which ended badly when Vancouver tried the same thing two years ago and for New Jersey last year). Canada has hope everywhere but Calgary. And in Calgary, the hope is that in the wake of the bonfire, something will grow.

The National Hockey League is back and much has changed.

Detroit is back in the Eastern Conference for the first time since the NHL placed them in the Western Conference at the start of the 1993-94 season. And Daniel Alfredsson is there with them, leaving behind the captaincy of the shoestring Senators.

Columbus has moved to the East, too, though they’re largely an afterthought. The old divisions are in the dustbin. The schedule is unbalanced in ways big and small, but at least we’re back to an 82-game grind, where improbabilities are more likely to be subsumed by sheer volume.

And that should make last season less of a predictor of future behaviour than most years, because in a span of 48 games luck plays a bigger role than it does over 82. The bounces of the game, the little mistakes, the injury that sidelines your best player for six weeks — all those are magnified when there’s only so much road to run.

They will return with a vengeance in the playoffs, of course, because that’s hockey for you.

But during an 82-game regular season, the teams that deserve to make the playoffs should get there, more or less.

Sidney Crosby is healthy again, for now. Alex Ovechkin is an MVP again, for now.

The league is remarkably stable as it enters its first full season since the 2012-13 lockout. There is no looming labour stoppage, fewer ownership worries, a TV deal.

Sidney Crosby is healthy again, for now. Alex Ovechkin is an MVP again, for now. And the last six Stanley Cups have been captured by big or powerful markets — Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit.

There won’t be another lockout until 2021 or so — there will almost certainly be another one since, from an ownership standpoint, they work — and there are new owners in New Jersey, Florida and even Phoenix.

So in the last year, commissioner Gary Bettman has actually sold the Coyotes to someone, bargained players down to 50 per cent of revenues from 57 per cent, authored a historic partnership on gay issues with You Can Play, and overseen a slight reduction in the size of goalie pads. He must be pleased.

All this means, of course, there will be problems elsewhere.

The league just announced a new partnership with Advil, which is a good reminder that talk of concussions died down during the shortened season, even if the concussions themselves did not.

Thanks to Monday’s adoption of hybrid icing, this was probably the first year nobody knew the rules until the day before the season began. And thanks to the new conference alignment, there is some fresh uncertainty.

“Frankly, the addition of a team, seven versus eight (in a division), those aren’t the teams that are really competing for the playoffs,” Bettman told The Canadian Press this week. “It’s really the top five or six teams that are doing it. I don’t think it’s a good idea for clubs to be using this as an excuse as to whether or not they make the playoffs.”

The top three teams in each of the four divisions will make the playoffs and then two wild-cards will round out the field regardless of division. And then the first couple rounds of the playoffs will be intra-divisional matchups, unless they’re not.

Bettman’s protestations aside, in a league whose standings are so often flattened by the three-point game, if you’re in the 14-team West you have a 57 per cent chance of getting in, versus 50 per cent in the 16-team East. Good news for Edmonton, Vancouver and Winnipeg; not so good for Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto.

And it’s potentially excellent news for the team that came closest to knocking out the Cup champion Blackhawks, even if it’s all new to them, too.

“We could sit here and I could tell you systems-wise what Chicago’s going to do, St. Louis, Nashville, Vancouver, L.A. — I can tell you what they’re going to do on their power plays, penalty kills, everything like that,” Detroit goaltender Jimmy Howard said this month. “But to be honest, I can’t really tell you much about the Eastern Conference and what they’re going to be doing.”

Of course, the East doesn’t know much about Detroit, either.

They will learn.

Everyone will learn.

Patrick Roy is back again and Martin Brodeur is about to leave

The nets are shallower, which should give creative types more angles to play with and force hard-hitting defencemen to make more decisions.

Patrick Roy is back again and Martin Brodeur is about to leave (and if he hurries the Devils might even make the playoffs, somehow). Roberto Luongo is back working solo. Marc-Andre Fleury is too, for the moment. And Ilya Bryzgalov has been jettisoned out into the universe.

Chicago deserved to win the Stanley Cup last season; every team that made the playoffs deserved to get in. In hockey, ‘deserve’ is a tricky word given the way the puck can bounce. But the Blackhawks earned their way to the top and they deserved it.

Would it have happened after a longer regular season, with more chance of injury, of fatigue, of the vagaries hockey brings? Impossible to know and that season is in the history books.

But now luck will have less of a role, hot streaks will have less of an impact, the rhythms will change and flatten into the familiar.

TORONTO — The Ontario coroner’s jurors who are now examining the death of Jeffrey Baldwin already know it was probably going to school — a couple of terms of kindergarten — that saved his sister’s life.

The little girl was six. Jeffrey was five. Pictures show once, they were as cute as any and all kids are, but the grandparents who had legal custody — Elva Bottineau and Norman Kidman, now in prison — inexplicably loathed them.

Bottineau and Kidman kept the two children apart from their siblings in an unheated, locked bedroom and forced them to spend hours in their own waste, without access to bathroom or potty; they starved them; they punished them with inventive cruelty, such as making them stand naked for hours in the bathtub.

Yet for no reason the jurors have heard, the grandparents let the little girl start half-day kindergarten in January of 2002. She went until June and came back in the fall.

(Neither the names of Jeffrey’s siblings nor the Toronto District School Board elementary school they all attended can be used.)

The snacks the little girl got there, pediatric nutritionist Dr. Stanley Zlotkin already has testified, may have spared her. The few hundred extra calories in a carton of milk or juice likely made all the difference.

But Jeffrey was not so lucky.

He was never sent to school.

In the last years of his life, he was rarely let out of his fetid prison-room, let alone his grandparents’ east-end Toronto house.

And on Nov. 30, 2002, weighing less than he had at one year old, suffering from chronic starvation, the little boy succumbed to pneumonia and septic shock.

So the school and its teachers were, as lawyer Suzan Fraser put it once Monday, a potential “point of protection” in the alleged village of people it takes to raise a child.

Fraser, who represents the provincial advocate for children and youth, was questioning Odette Revoredo, who in 2002 was the little girl’s kindergarten teacher.

Preceding her on the witness stand was Helen Voikos, a now-retired educational assistant who helped in the kindergarten classes.

In heavily accented English, she remembered the sister as a “nice little girl who want to eat many snacks and followed me wherever I go.”

Voikos said the child also stank of urine, and “everybody knew” and other kids would avoid her because of the smell.

She also said she discussed this with Revoredo, and she believed it was the teacher’s responsibility, not hers, to do something about it.

In fact, of course, it was their joint professional responsibility.

So, Voikos having set the table, there was coroner’s counsel Jill Witkin asking Revoredo about what exactly she knew or had noticed about the little girl.

She was “happy, cheerful, eager to socialize with other children,” the teacher said. She noticed she followed the assistant around. She noticed she was “very interested” in the snacks, but other children sometimes asked for seconds or thirds too.

She noticed “a distinct odour,” which Revoredo thought might be related to “toileting issues” the little girl was having. She knew about her spotty attendance: In her first term with another teacher, she had missed 23 days; with Revoredo, she had missed 17 days of 62, but as she “was away with a reason,” she thought little of it.

The teacher knew she had some problems with “fine motor skills,” and sometimes had to be helped to hold her pencil. She knew the girl had been “held back” — in other words, she had failed kindergarten, though of course, in the modern Ontario educational system, such judgmental terms aren’t used anymore.

That would explain the sunny “progress report” Revoredo prepared.

She worked on it that November, while the little girl was still sporadically attending class, but it’s dated after Jeffrey died, and the girl and their other siblings had been taken into care and removed from the school.

The report is a spectacular example of bafflegab.

It means absolutely squat.

Even had it been handed out to caring normal parents, as opposed to the grandparent freaks who were years later convicted of second-degree murder in Jeffrey’s death and of forcible confinement for the locking-up of the little girl, the report offered no clue she was suffering, strikingly abnormal, in need of rescue.

Witkin went through some of the teacher’s notes in the report.

“It makes no mention of her academic and developmental challenges?” she asked.

“That’s correct,” Revoredo said.

No mention the little girl was always hungry. No mention of the smell of urine. No mention of the attendance problems.

She was almost seven, two years behind her age group. She couldn’t print her first name without help.

Yet, in the “language” section of the progress report, what Revoredo wrote was the following: “She is becoming comfortable with printing her first name independently.”

It means just the opposite, of course — she couldn’t do it without help.

The report gave no hint there were any particular concerns about the sister, as Witkin said, asking, “Is that fair?”

Black Range Rover runs over bikers in New York City

A black Range Rover ran over a group of bikers in New York City during an annual street ride. After running over multiple people at the :50 second mark, he takes off only to run over another person at the 5:00 minute mark.

Police said the initial contact was inadvertent on the part of the SUV driver and that the motorcyclists attacked the vehicle in response. At the 50-second mark of the video, the SUV accelerates, hitting several motorcycles, although it is not clear if any riders were injured.

After a five-minute chase along New York’s West Side Highway, the motorcyclists caught up to the black Range Rover in upper Manhattan and begin smashing the windows of the SUV.

While the video ends at this point, the NYPD says the 33-year-old driver was pulled from the SUV, beaten in front of his wife and five-year-old child. He was taken to hospital with lacerations to his face. He was not charged.

Police confirmed the video as authentic and said the motorcycle ride did not appear to be a sanctioned event.

WASHINGTON — U.S. President Barack Obama on Monday accused Republicans of holding the country hostage as the nasty, seemingly unending battle over ObamaCare largely shut down the government of the United States.

A midnight deadline came and went without any deal, sending the U.S. government into a freeze that has no quick end in sight.

Speaking at the White House before the deadline passed, Obama told reporters the Republicans were attempting “to extract a ransom … just because there is a law there that (they) don’t like.”

The shutdown is expected to result in the temporary layoffs of about 750,000 civil servants and potentially weaken the economy until lawmakers can agree on a renewed budget.

The stakes are high. As the largest employer in the U.S., a prolonged shutdown would have serious effects on the economy, which is still feeling the aftershocks of the 2008 recession. Studies of previous shutdowns indicate they could take about $8 billion a week out of the economy. Past closures in 1995 and 1996 sent stock markets down as much as two per cent. Fear of a shutdown caused the Dow to fall almost one per cent on Monday.

The threat has been looming for weeks as Washington’s extreme adversarial politics has escalated into yet another standoff over fiscal policy.

Led primarily by the far-right followers of the Tea Party, Republicans last week launched what Democrats describe as “extortionist” tactics designed ultimately to destroy Obama’s cherished affordable health-care program.

The Republican-controlled House threatened last week to pass a budget that would defund the program, essentially killing it. Over the weekend, the House approved a modified budget bill that would delay implementation of the health-care program for one year and called on Obama to suggest a compromise.

The Democrat-controlled Senate quickly rejected the bill Monday afternoon by a vote of 54-46 that tracked party lines and Obama vowed to veto any bill that weakened ObamaCare.

As the U.S. crept closer to the critical midnight hour, a revolt by a small group of moderate House Republicans on Monday evening briefly raised hopes that the fiscal crisis could be avoided. These Republicans voiced support for a temporary budget-renewal bill that would postpone the battle over health care for another day. The rebels, however, were quickly dispatched in a House vote that again testified to the power of the Tea Party.

“Unfortunately right now the House Republicans continue to tie funding of the government to ideological demands like limiting a woman’s access to contraception or delaying the affordable care act, all to save face after making some impossible promises to the extreme right wing of their party,” Obama said Monday.

Obama’s health-care plan is designed to help about 30 million Americans, many of who are unemployed, obtain private health insurance. Although the program began only this week, Republicans such as Sen. Ted Cruz claim it is in disarray, “hurts millions of Americans” and “should be repealed entirely.”

Polls indicate that while up to 56 per cent of Americans oppose the plan, 11 per cent are against it because they don’t think it goes far enough. Many want a more universal government-funded health-care program.

MPs spend more than $123 million on office, travel and other expenses

The House of Commons has released a summary of the more than $123 million in expenditures for individual members of Parliament for the 2012-13 fiscal year – including how much they and their offices spent on travel, accommodations, residences, hospitality, advertising and a number of other categories.

All parliamentarians have been under increasing scrutiny for how they spend taxpayer dollars, following the Senate expenses scandal that has embroiled the Prime Minister’s Office, three current and one now-former senator.

The Members’ Expenditures Report released Monday provides detailed information on MPs’ budgets and includes a summary of their expenses. All told, Canada’s 308 MPs spent about $123.7 million in 2012-13, including $13.3 million on individual MP travel, $3.7 million in MPs’ secondary residence expenses and $5 million on advertising in their constituencies.

Total expenditures on MPs’ budgets increased in 2012-13 from the $121.3 million in 2011-12, with the amount spent on salaries and service contracts increasing to $67.4 million from $62.5 million in 2011-12.

Among the four main national political leaders, official Opposition Leader Tom Mulcair spent the most, although a number of costs for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, including travel, aren’t included in the report and are picked up by other departments, like Privy Council Office or the Department of National Defence, as part of his prime ministerial duties.

Harper’s taxpayer-funded bill for his MP’s office was $284,682, while NDP leader Mulcair compiled a taxpayer bill of $550,831.

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s expenses totalled $386,714 for the 2012-13 year (only part of which he was leader), while Green party Leader Elizabeth May (a British Columbia MP) racked up $407,403 in expenses.

Here’s a summary of total MPs’ expenses, those for the four main national leaders and a breakdown of each individual MP:

'Oh man, is it nerve-wracking!'

She wore skates on Sunday night’s Battle of the Blades, but Jamie Sale spent the majority of the night sitting down.

The former world and Olympic champ in pairs figure skating is settling into her new role as judge on the popular CBC series. But she’s not sitting pretty just yet.

“Oh man, is it nerve-racking! … I told Kurt (Browning), the last time I was this nervous I was competing,” Sale says over the phone.

It’s Monday afternoon and the 36-year-old is home in Edmonton after attending the live broadcast in Toronto the night before. She and Browning, who still co-hosts BOTB, are newbies to the judging gig, as is former competitor P.J. Stock.

“It’s hard because we really like everybody. They are sacrificing time with their families to do this and they are all working so hard. It totally sucks to have to differentiate, and separate them even though they are doing their best.

“That is the worst part about judging.”

When the show premièred in 2009, Sale was partnered with former Oiler Craig Simpson. (A lifelong Flames fan, the native Albertan had been hoping for Lanny McDonald, but he couldn’t do the show.) Sale and Simpson went on to win that first season and eventually married. Now, they are parents to a three-month-old girl, Samantha, as part of their blended family. (Sale has a six-year-old son with ex-husband and former skating partner David Pelletier, while Simpson has three children with his first wife, Christine.)

Sale will fly to Toronto on Fridays and jet home Sunday nights after the show. It’s taking some juggling — and extra grandma time for the kids — but it’s worth it, she says. Having a family is priority one and being on the other side of the boards at BOTB is a good place for her to be … for now.

“I don’t miss skating that way. Honestly, I don’t really miss it. I am really happy. I wouldn’t say I would never do it again but … I have a young family and it don’t want to leave them. . . . I am really in a good place and so happy, with so much joy in my life.”

Her time as a competitor on the show (she also appeared in Season 2) gives her insight into what it takes for the former hockey players to get on the ice. As for the level of skating in Week 1, Sale says she is blown away by how the eight teams skated during the first performance show. There were overhead lifts aplenty, a throw, complicated handholds and actual emotion on display.

And while she doesn’t want to single out any teams to watch, Sale says she wouldn’t be shocked if some of the skaters in the middle of the pack step up their game.

“There’s a surprise every year. I can see someone like Jason Strudwick getting better every week and being there at the end. That is very possible. Also, Mike Krushelnyski is at the bottom of the leaderboard, but he might end up improving. He is a really, really good skater.”

Whoever makes it to the end — and the $100,000 grand prize for charity — will need to have that X-factor (to hijack another reality show) that elevates their performance from the meh to the truly memorable.

“The technical stuff only gets you so far and being showy only gets you so far,” she points out. And she reminds viewers that there is a new factor in play this season.

“There will be a save one week,” she says of the twist that will let the three judges save one team from elimination, if they agree unanimously to use it. “That might be the biggest surprise of them all.”